The Case for Strategic Mediocrity

Excellence is expensive. Not just in time or money, but in attention, emotional bandwidth, and the opportunity cost of not being mediocre elsewhere. You cannot be world-class at everything. This is not a failure of discipline or ambition. It is arithmetic.

We are surrounded by messages insisting otherwise. Algorithms serve up morning routines of successful people. Feeds display elaborate systems for optimising fitness, productivity, relationships, finances, learning. The performance of refinement across multiple domains is constant, and it is often just that: performance. The person posting their 5am workout is often exhausted by noon. The elaborate meal prep system is usually bland chicken eaten for the seventh consecutive day. The documentation of excellence is not evidence of excellence. It is evidence of documentation.

But the underlying pressure is real. The expectation is that you should be improving everywhere simultaneously. Human consciousness has finite capacity. Every domain you pursue with genuine excellence requires resources that must come from somewhere else. The question is not whether you will be mediocre at most things. You will. The question is whether you choose which things, and how you engage with them once you have made that choice.